Dear all,

We have had yet another exciting and fun-filled week!

Literacy: Over the course of the week we have worked really hard on writing a high-quality narrative piece and ensuring we achieve all of our writing targets. We also peer and self-assessed our work and set personal goals for our final narrative piece which we will complete next week. On Tuesday we completed some exciting reciprocal reading stations where we focused on our questioning, summarising, predicting and clarifying skills.

Numeracy and Maths: This week we primarily focused on converting between decimals, fractions and percentages and some problem solving surrounding this. Alongside our knowledge of this topic, we were also using our multiplication, division, addition and subtraction skills to solve these problems! A class highlight this week was definitely getting the water out to represent different decimals, percentages and fractions of a cup’s volume and convert between. We particularly enjoyed trying to fill 99.9% and 0.01% of our cups with water! We also continued our work on area and perimeter by drawing and measuring our own shapes.

IDL: Since our science topic is biodiversity, we have been learning about animal adaptations. We found that lots of different animals have both behavioural and physical adaptations to respond to their habitats. We decided to research an adapted animal of our choice and we are now working collaboratively to create some models of these. We were challenged to use a variety of materials that we could find around the classroom, with many of us selecting recycled fabrics, clay, paper straws, tin-foil, bordering, lollipop sticks and much more!

Outdoor learning: This week we were very excited to get outside because the weather was absolutely beautiful and we have noticed lots of signs of Spring finally arriving! We decided to head out to the woodland, with our partners and clipboards, and sketch out our very own nature scene. We discussed different types of sketching techniques and how we might use these to capture the beauty of our surroundings. Our sketches are beautiful and many children said that they loved how calm and peaceful the environment felt.

Art: On Tuesday, we were lucky enough to have Mrs Lea who did some fantastic artwork with us! We worked hard all week to finish our designs and we will enjoy decorating our classroom with these next week.

Health and Wellbeing: This week we have been exploring World Water Day; this links with UN Rights articles 24 and 27 and global goal 6 which aim to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. For P.E. we have been working on skipping and we have enjoyed doing this outside in the fresh air! On Friday we were thinking about the beat and rhythm that is involved in skipping and challenging ourselves to skip in time to Miss Ventisei’s clapping! This was a little tricky to begin with but soon we managed it no problem! Another highlight was skipping with the big and little ropes, together as a team and also on our own.

R.E.: Thursday was the beginning of Ramadan so we decided to learn a little about this special holy month. It was lovely to hear some of our classmates speak about the importance of Ramadan and the different things that they do to observe this. We explored the 5 Pillars Of Islam and learned that fasting is the 4th Pillar. We also looked at an example of a Kindness Calendar that some Muslims use throughout Ramadan.

On Friday we were introduced to the Stations of The Cross. We used a video to help guide us along and practice the responses but we will do this ourselves next week as it is the final week before Easter. We also explored lots of the station’s artwork and images in various beautiful churches and used these as inspiration to create our very own stations to display around the classroom- we’ll use these next week!

Sadly Miss Ventisei was unable to upload the pictures for this week but these will be posted in next week’s blog!

Our Hot Chocolate Winner was Emily! Well done and congratulations Emily!

Have a lovely week everyone,

P5A and Miss Ventisei